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A "comprehensive...fascinating" (The New York Times Book Review)
history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one
of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject, with a new
afterword about the recent hate crimes against Asian Americans. In
the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face
of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United
States. But much of their long history has been forgotten. "In her
sweeping, powerful new book, Erika Lee considers the rich,
complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the
United States" (Huffington Post). The Making of Asian America shows
how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born
descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors
who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the
Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past
fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community
activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee
shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both "despised
minorities" and "model minorities," revealing all the ways that
racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country.
Published fifty years after the passage of the United States'
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, these "powerful Asian
American stories...are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice
in a book that is long overdue" (Los Angeles Times). But more than
that, The Making of Asian America is an "epic and eye-opening"
(Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself,
its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in
the world today.
With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the
first group in American history to be excluded from the United
States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law
changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little
about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United
States as a nation of immigrants.
"At America's Gates" is the first book devoted entirely to both
Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who
sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion
laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration
patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United
States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification,
border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were
extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United
States before.
Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including
recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews,
and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets,
hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book
exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American
immigration control and race relations.
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